Determination of Intercarrier Interference Covariance Matrices and their Application to Advanced Equalization for Mobile OFDM

— In the this paper we investigate advanced equalization schemes that are adapted to the mobile transmission channel. Mobile OFDM systems experience intercarrier interference (ICI). ICI is an additional disturbance that, in contrast to thermal noise, is of colored nature and is characterized through a not purely diagonal covariance matrix. The advanced equalization schemes studied here exploit the inherent structure of the intercarrier and noise covariance matrix by means of noise whitening and are applicable to both, single and multiple antenna receivers. In this paper we present an analytical description of the intercarrier interference covariance matrix and show its dependencies on the characteristics of the mobile channel. Furthermore, we discuss the implementation of noise whitening schemes, where we focus on the adequate determination of the interference and noise covariance matrix. Finally, we provide numerical result in order to assess the potential performance improvement of such schemes.